WHITE SUPREMACY-2 BY MARVIN X

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Marvin X Tribute sponsored The Oakland Post, show #1

Marvin X at Yoshi's, San Francisco, 2011

The Black Arts Movement at Yoshi's, San Francisco

Last night at Yoshi's in the Fillmore, Amiri Baraka and Roscoe Mitchell performed a concert partially devoted to the life and times of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baraka photo Kamau Amen Ra


Baraka is godfather of the Black Arts Movement or BAM, and Roscoe Mitchell of the Chicago Arts Ensemble is a BAM Master as well. They were joined by poet Marvin X who opened both sets with a poem. Marvin X's Black Arts West Theatre, 1966, was a block or two down from Yoshi's at Turk and Fillmore. With playwright Ed Bullins, essayist Eldridge Cleaver (Soul on Ice) and Ethna X, companion of Marvin X, they established the political/cultural Center called Black House.

The Black House on Broderick Street was the center for radical culture in the Bay Area, 1967. Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Emory Douglas, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Lil Bobby Hutton, Sarah Webster Fabio, Avotcja, Samuel Napier, Ellendar Barnes, Dezzie Woods Jones, Bennie Ivy, Norman Brown, Walter Riley, Rosco Proctor, and numerous arts and politicos congregated at Black House. The Chicago Arts Ensemble had performed. Roscoe remembers the Black House, especially the food. Ethna X (Hurriyah) and Amina Baraka created the food.




photo Gene Hazzard



Tonight was the rare coming together of BAM artists from three regions, although BAM was bi-coastal. Baraka from Newark, New Jersey, Roscoe from Chicago and Marvin X from the San Francisco Bay. Marvin X also worked at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem and with Sun Ra. Sun Ra created music for two musicals of Marvin's Take Care of Business (aka Flowers for the Trashman) and Resurrection of the Dead.

After Marvin's opening poem, Roscoe began with percussion work. He tinkered with bells and other sounds, preparing the way for Baraka, but this opening was himself at his greatest. Calmly he went about his musical work.

A musician who accompanies a poet must be humble to the word, he cannot become self-consumed so that we do not hear the word. Such a musician is thus highly conscious of the word as he is of himself. But the focus is on the word and he respects the word and wants to enhance the word, accent the word.

Roscoe is the man for the job. The first set he was reserved, it was a kind of rehearsal, though there is a natural harmony between the poet and musician, most especially with Amiri Baraka, who highly appreciates music and musicians. This is the BAM tradition.

At Black Arts West Theatre on Fillmore, we used to let the musicians be free. They asked to be free. During our productions they might roam the stage, the audience and go outside on the street to join the sounds of the street traffic and cars, often doing a call and response with car horns: Dewey Redman, Donald Rafael Garrett, Monte Waters, Earl Davis, BJ, Oliver Johnson, were some of the Black Arts West musicians.

Baraka joined Mitchell with tales and poems of his childhood in Newark, what a weird child he was, reading Japanese poetry and coming up with Lowku, the Negro version of Haiku Ku because we don't have time to count syllables. Baraka is the court jester, the comedian, the joker who is more than serious, for he is too bright to be taken lightly, the opposite of the people in one of poems, white racists, who are too ignut to understand what's happening to them, too ignut to be white even.

Baraka began his tribute to MLK with the wedding of MLK and Coretta Scott. He weaved his narrative by chronicling major events of MLK and the Civil Rights Movement. It was a history lesson every child should know, the dates, the events, the names of warriors, martyrs and devils Rosa Parks, Bull Conners, Black Power, Freedom Riders, Student Sit-ins, Black Power, Non-violence.

Baraka, 77 this year, transformed from poet to actor, playwright, singer, doing all the parts of blacks and whites. He sang all the freedom songs throughout his narrative, revealing his knowledge of black Christian culture, for it was the foundation of the Civil Rights Movement, after all, non-violence is a Christian concept, born of Jesus Christ, although at one point Baraka mentioned that Christians need do a body count as a result of their religion.

It was interesting to hear and see Baraka tell the story of MLK from his perspective, a participant/observer, analyst, organizer, living historian, walking history himself. He told the time MKL knocked on his door in Newark, during the Poor People's campaign, Martin had a stubble beard with no tie on. The King said to the king, Le Roi, you don't look like such a bad fellow!

Baraka does not attempt revisionist history, but tells it like it was, even free of strident ideology, propaganda, just the story. All the time Roscoe is dancing from horn to horn, never upstaging but accenting always, a call and response in the African and BAM tradition, which are one.

Only after Baraka ended the King narrative with his assassination did Roscoe take off on his horns, and this was especially during the second set. He took us to a lyrical land of sound and beauty, letting us know he is one of the true Masters of creative sound.

The audience gave the brothers much applause and appreciation. Ninety per cent of those present were whites. A brother whispered to me in the lobby, "Man, I never heard or seen anything like this in my life!"



Baraka could have used some help reading all the parts. Indeed, after the last set, he asked me rhetorically, Marvin why didn't you help me do this?
--Marvin X
1/18/11

Baraka and Marvin at Yoshi's
photo Julian Carroll

America--Get Ready for Revolution

American--Get Ready for Revolution


It should be clear to any blind man, or any deaf and dumb person that dissatisfaction brings change. Surely, it is only a matter of time when the dispossessed Americans shall rise up to overthrow the greedy corporate-global finance, military complex of blood suckers who have stolen the basic wealth of Americans to satisfy the greedy scoundrels who will perpetuate and defend white supremacy to the bitter end.

We look forward to the day when the poor rise up as a united fist in the face of the robber barons, the Wall Street bankers and global financiers who care nothing for the poor, jobless, homeless, incarcerated and mentally ill.

The blood suckers of the poor are seeing their last days in North Africa and the Middle East. Throughout the Americas, save North America, the people are throwing the free market capitalist system into the dustbin of history. They see a more socially responsible way to bring about economic vitality, a way that transcends wretched wage slavery and putrid consumerism, the world of make believe based on materialism, or desiring what we do not need, an addiction worse than the addiction to drugs.

And yet the North American need for drugs to medicate themselves from the nothingness and dread is so profound that in the last few years forty thousand people have lost their lives in Mexico in the competition to feed the Gringos their medication needed to numb them from the trauma of living in their world of make believe.

The wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan are for the sole purpose of protecting the American greed and need for oil to perpetuate their world of make believe, yes, call it American Exceptionalism, the delusion and illusion that White Supremacy is the order of the day and must be maintained at the point of the gun.

Let the true American patriots arise from the ranks of the jobless who have been tricked by the Globalists, the homeless tricked by the Wall Street pyramid schemers who duped them of their basic wealth with the sub prime load scam.

Let the homeless seize their property back from the banks and mortgage companies who were in conspiracy with the Federal Reserve to rob the poor, enticing them with quick fix gambling notions of instant wealth that was nothing but a typical pyramid scheme that should have banked the bankers into prison cells, yet they were rewarded and had their coffers replenished while those tricked were forced into homelessness and mental depression, if not suicide and homicide, many physically abusing their mates when the true nature of their condition was made plain.

Let the Americans transcend their addiction to white supremacy, although they will not be able to do so without a program of detoxification and recovery, unless revolution itself shall be their process of recovery, for in revolution they may discover their true friends from their true enemies.

They may come to realize the global capitalist bandits do not discriminate, that they pimp white workers as well as black, Latino and Asians, pay all women less than men for the same labor to perpetuate the patriarchal system of superiority and domination.

Surely it is time for the oppressed Americans to come out of their deep sleep caused by the Monkey Mind Media and white supremacy mis-education, based on degrees that will not help them obtain jobs in the present era, not while the bandits outsource to China, India and elsewhere. And even this outsourcing is a grand deception because American corporations share ownership with factories in China, India and elsewhere, thus USA corporations are guilty of seeking cheap labor to avoid paying American workers a living wage, while the CEO get mega bonuses, but American workers only get notices their labor is no longer wanted or needed.

Let the American workers seize the factories and corporations as a human right, for wage slavery must be abolished just as chattel slavery was abolished in the Civil War. Let their now be a Second Civil War to adjudicate the crimes of the present era wherein 1% possess wealth equal to that of 90%. By what right should a minority not share the wealth? Only by the right of capitalist greed.

The people in the Middle East are pointing the direction that Americans must ultimately travel if they are to reclaim their human dignity and divine right to joy, peace and happiness.

Do not be hoodwinked and bamboozled by the Democratic and Republican parties who themselves are pimped by the corporations through lobbyists who will promote the sale of your mother for a price!
--Marvin X
4/14/11